6 Reasons you need to start Tracking Chat Conversions

Would you rather text your friends or call them? How about someone you don’t know? Most people prefer the convenience of texting, and the same is true for consumers. 57% of consumers prefer live chat as a communication method with businesses.

If your business has live chat, people are going to use it. If customers are using it, you have to track it. That means capturing every new lead that comes in via chat, tracking details about each lead, and tying it all to the marketing responsible for the lead.

Whether you’ve just added live chat software, you’re revamping your website or you’re reconsidering your whole approach to lead tracking, it’s imperative that you capture chats the right way. Read on to discover six reasons to get serious about chat tracking.

1. You’ll be able to repeat the process that got you the chat

As a digital marketer, you’re always trying to figure out how to accomplish two things:

• Drive traffic to your website.

• Fine-tune your site so visitors want to reach out via chat, phone call or form-fill.

When a visitor does start a chat, that’s a win for your business. It’s in your best interest to figure out how you got that win so you can repeat the process moving forward. That means figuring out which marketing channel inspired the person to visit your site and identifying the page on your site that prompted them to start the chat.

Once you’ve got all that information, you can double down on the effective marketing campaign and drive people directly to the page that led to the chat. This creates a powerful positive feedback loop of marketing effectiveness.

2. Chat tracking makes Google Analytics more powerful

Using Google Analytics (GA), you can get a full picture of the conversion funnels that your customers go through before reaching out via chat. GA allows you to see which page the lead landed on, which page they went to next, and which page they were on when they started the chat.

The key to this information is using Google Analytics Conversion Goals. Once you add "chat" as a Conversion Goal, you can use your lead tracking software in conjunction with Google Analytics to see all the marketing data behind every chat conversion. You’ll be able to see the entire journey; from the marketing campaign to the user’s website navigation and the moment they decided to get in touch via chat. With all this insight, you’ll be able to produce detailed reports that reveal how you can further optimize your site for more chat conversions moving forward.

3. The more lead data you have, the more insights you get.

Just because you can track chat conversions doesn’t mean you’re capturing the full lead. Most companies have no problem tracking that a chat conversion occurred, and some can even track the marketing responsible for the lead.

The competitive advantage comes from capturing the complete lead; the information beyond just the marketing source and conversion such as the page they landed on, the page that inspired them to reach out, the chat transcripts, the device they’re using, their contact information, and more. With more data, you can create reports that show more insights about which marketing channels are working.

4. Capturing chats will allow you to answer all your marketing questions

The idea behind data-driven marketing is that more data allows you to answer more questions about your marketing. If you can track every detail about every chat lead, you can answer questions such as;

• What marketing inspired a customer to reach out via chat?

• Are the leads coming into my business leading to sales?

• When a customer gets in touch via chat, is that a good lead or a bad lead?

• How much are my chat leads worth compared to my form-fill leads?

Whether you work at an agency or you’re an in-house marketer, you’ll face questions about your marketing efforts. The more data you can collect, the more confidence you’ll have in your answers.

5. You need to be able to analyze chat leads alongside all other leads.

When you’re shopping for a tool that allows you to capture chat conversions, look for tools that display chat conversions alongside all other conversions such as phone calls, form-fills and eCommerce transactions. With every lead in one place and accounted for, you can sort and filter the lead data to uncover insights.

Organizing your live chats alongside your phone call, form-fill and eCommerce transaction data will give you the most complete snapshot of your marketing effectiveness. The point of tracking chat conversions (as well as all other types of conversions) is to ensure your marketing data accounts for every lead. When no leads slip through the cracks, you can be sure your data is accurate and actionable.

6. Detailed chat tracking helps both marketing and sales teams.

Tracking chats down to the lead details gives you the opportunity to identify which chat conversions come from good leads and which are junk leads. Junk leads waste everyone’s time and can skew your marketing data by making campaigns seem more effective than they really are. Disqualifying these bad leads prevents the junk leads from ever getting to your sales team and clogging up their pipelines. When you can clearly identify good leads, you give your salespeople confidence that the marketing team is only passing along the best possible leads.

Ready to start tracking your chats? Let’s talk next steps. First, make sure you have a powerful live chat tool like Jivochat installed on your site. Next, look for a lead tracking tool like WhatConverts that allows you to gather all your leads in one place. Once you’ve done those two things, you’ll be ready to uncover all the marketing insights that come along with an effective live chat system.